my favourite part of ao3 not having an algorithm is that i can click on any random fic, out of whatever curiosity (morbid or otherwise) i may have on a whim, knowing I won't spend the next three months having ''similar'' content constantly shoved in my face in a desperate attempt to keep me engaged while i stab the not interested button over and over with a growing rage bubbling beneath my skin
Oh, I was screaming about dragon butts on this one ALL the time. So much fun!
This is sort of in the spirit of the Stuckony Mix'n Match Stockings 2025 exchange (see also @stuckony-mix-n-match-stockings) and very much inspired by and a gift for papermacherainbow. I didn't have a clear idea for the picture until after the event but liked the idea too much to abandon it.
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Dragonshifter Tony [Art] (0 words) by 5yearslatewithEarlGrey
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Characters: Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, James "Bucky" Barnes
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Fantasy
If you disagree, that's fine! A lot of these are disputed (but I will put if they commonly are).
An important note : Some of these terms are fanfiction-specific, whereas some are scarcely used outside of traditionally published fiction. I am including both because I personally quite like to have the option and insight into non-fanfiction writing.
I added a tldr at the bottom because this list became quite extensive, but some of the explanations are important!! Check before describing your ficlet as a vignette!
﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏🖋
⌯⌲ Nanofiction / Nanofic : <50 words (in my opinion) - This term is used infrequently but is defined by very few words/sentences.
⌯⌲ Microfiction / Microfic : (approx.) 50-100 words - Between fandoms/fests/non-fanfiction the length of a microfic is debated, it's ultimately just a very short piece of fiction.
⌯⌲ Mini-Saga : 50 words exactly - In which the content is based around a longer story. It occasionally has a 15 character title limit.
⌯⌲ Snippet : <1000 words, usually at least 300 - The length of a snippet is vague, but it specifically refers to a short extract of a longer piece of writing. Sometimes this is as a 'teaser', but it should never be that long.
⌯⌲ Drabble : 100 words exactly - No more, no less (though writers often use 'drabble' and 'microfic' interchangeably).
⌯⌲ Dribble : 25/50 words - A colloquial term sometimes used for 'half/quarter of a drabble' i.e. 25 or 50 words exactly, and sometimes used as a generalisation for any fic <100.
⌯⌲ Double/Triple Drabble : 200/300 words exactly - And so on. This applies basically up to 500 words, fics longer than that would typically be otherwise categorised, but technically yes you could have a Nonuple Drabble
⌯⌲ Flash Fiction / Flashfic : 100-1,500 words (typically <1000 in 'regular fiction' and <500 in fanfiction) - Flash fiction just means a short piece of fiction with a complete narrative. Within fanfiction communities, 'flashfic' is often associated with having a set period of time to write.
⌯⌲ Sudden Fiction : <750 words - In physical media, it can also be up to 5 pages, but sudden fiction is characterised by its brevity, linguistic precision, and usually an atypical structure (sometimes anachronism or fragmented narration).
⌯⌲ Vignette : <1000 words, typically >500 words - A vignette must be under 1000 words, and it must narrate a single scene. If more than one scene is written, it's a ficlet.
⌯⌲ Postcard Fiction : <300 words - A whole story intended to evoke emotion that should 'fit on a postcard'. It's often paired with an image, like a postcard.
⌯⌲ Ficlet : 150-1000 words - There's no precise word count, but ficlets are notably longer than microfics/drabbles, and rarely surpass 1000 words.
⌯⌲ Short-short : 500-1000 words - Meaning a short, short story, this is a term that's fallen out of use in the fanfiction community, and was more common from the 80s-early 2000s
⌯⌲ Short Story : 1000-7,500 words - Longer than a short-short (obviously) but shorter than a novelette. Fanfictions that are short stories are often oneshots so that tends to be how people classify them. Short story is used to describe so many lengths of fiction, that this word count it used simple to distinguish between different classifications.
⌯⌲ Long Story / Longfic : >40,000 words - This is absolutely my opinion, it's incredibly individual what people consider longfics. I've seen people say numbers from 20k-100k as a minimum.
⌯⌲ Novelette : 7,500-17,500 words - A stand-alone, complete story (often focusing on lighter themes - they're traditional romantic or whimsical - and almost always set in a single location). Contemporary novelettes are rare, but their themes are more flexible through different genres.
⌯⌲ Novella : 17,500-40,000 words - A stand-alone, complete story, like the previous, novellas are written to be read in one go. (often focusing on a single conflict, with one protagonist and a handful of secondary characters, due to the word restrictions, they tend to work on character development of the protagonist above all). Traditionally, novellas were written with a satirical, moral, or educational purpose.
⌯⌲ Novel : 40,000- (approx.)120,000 words - The word counts for novels are debated, and there are definitely outliers, however almost all fit within this range. Novels are meant to be read over several days (hence why they have chapters and novellas rarely do) and due to the 'limitless' word count, their plots can be as complex or simple as the writer pleases.
⌯⌲ Epic : 120,000-300,000+ words - An epic is just a huge piece of writing, Tolstoy's War and Peace is often considered an epic novel and it has almost 600,000 words. Due to it's history an epic is hard to define but its typical qualities include taking itself seriously (jokes and poor quality rarely connote the grandeur associated with epics) intertextualism/cultural/mythical references, a huge scope for worldbuilding (in every sense), a hero, adventures, and 'momentous' themes.
⌯⌲ Saga : 120,000+ words (20-70 years) - Sagas and epics are very similar, their main difference is historical/geographical origin. That being said, there are some core thematic and stylistic differences. Sagas must narrate a story over the course of a long time, and instead of focus on a hero, they often revolve around a group of people or a family. It's historical, generational, and prose (where epics tend to be poetic) the narration is often rather straight-forward too.
⌯⌲ Six Words : 6 words - Inspired by Ernest Hemingway, 6 word stories thrive due to the marriage of brevity and ambiguity. They're popular both in and out of the fanfiction world.
⌯⌲ 1 Sentence : self-explanatory - Similarly to six words, a many people like the brevity and limits of a single sentence - that being said, you can't just use terrible punctuation and write a paragraph.
⌯⌲ One-shot : any word count, just one chapter - One-shots can technically be any length (disregarding website-imposed word limits). That being said, one-shots are fanfiction specific, and chapterisation works differently to traditional books - i.e. if your one-shot is has >10,000 words, it should probably be a two-shot.
⌯⌲ Two-shot / Three-shot : any word count, this just refers to the amount of chapters - Referring to chaptered fanfictions as "x-shot" isn't used very often unless the number of chapters is intentional (e.g. '5+1' six-shots or '5 times' five-shots).
TLDR
⌯⌲ Nanofiction / Nanofic : <50 words
⌯⌲ Microfiction / Microfic : (approx.) 50-100 words
⌯⌲ Mini-Saga : 50 words
⌯⌲ Snippet : <1000 words, usually at least 300
⌯⌲ Drabble : 100 words
⌯⌲ Dribble : 25/50 words
⌯⌲ Double/Triple Drabble : 200/300 words
⌯⌲ Flash Fiction / Flashfic : 100-1,500 words
⌯⌲ Sudden Fiction : <750 words
⌯⌲ Vignette : <1000 words, typically >500 words
⌯⌲ Postcard Fiction : <300 words
⌯⌲ Ficlet : 150-1000 words
⌯⌲ Short-short : 500-1000 words
⌯⌲ Short Story : 1000-7,500 words
⌯⌲ Long Story / Longfic : >40,000 words
⌯⌲ Novelette : 7,500-17,500 words
⌯⌲ Novella : 17,500-40,000 words
⌯⌲ Novel : 40,000- (approx.)120,000 words
⌯⌲ Epic : 120,000-300,000+ words
⌯⌲ Saga : 120,000+ words
⌯⌲ Six Words : 6 words
⌯⌲ 1 Sentence : self-explanatory
⌯⌲ One-shot : any word count, just one chapter
⌯⌲ Two-shot / Three-shot : any word count, this just refers to the amount of chapters
If you haven't heard, the em dash has been getting a lot of attention lately…
Because it was trained on pirated work—including freely accessible online writing (like fanfic, academic texts)—ChatGPT picked up patterns and quirks native to human writing.
Including (sigh) the em dash.
There are other victims here (RIP tapestry and delve 🫠), but the appropriation of the em dash—a punctuation mark beloved by writers everywhere—feels especially personal.
A kind of low-grade panic is ensuing. Writers who once memed their own em dash overuse—the greatest punctuation mark ever to grace the control-freak’s lexicon, frankly—are suddenly backing away to avoid accusations.
No. More. We have centuries of dash-abusing writers behind us. We will not sit quietly while AI repurposes our beloved stilted aside—or the just-one-more clarification the sentence demands—or the dramatic pause your comma could never—etc.
You don’t write like AI—AI writes like you.
Defend the em dash.
(Feel free to download/share/stick it where it matters!)
I was in a college psych class, and the teacher was doing some kind of exercise about memory, patterns, and retention. He began with, “for instance, if I asked you what number the first letter of your name is in the alphabet, you wouldn’t be able to tell me right aw–”
“Ten,” I said.
“What?”
“J. J is ten,” I said again.
He stared at me.
“I happened to learn it while looking at the alphabet when I was five or six, and it just stayed in my brain,” I told him.
Then we did an exercise on retention. “I’m going to tell you a story,” he said, “and then I’m going to send you out of the room for five minutes, and when you come back, you have to repeat as much of the story back to me as possible.”
He told me a long and meandering story with no plot or structure, just a random series of events, place names, actions, etc. Then he sent me out of the room.
I looked at the wall for a while.
He called me back in five minutes later, stood me up in front of the class, and asked me to repeat “just as much of the story as you remember.” Apparently while I’d been gone he’d been telling the class about how eyewitness accounts aren’t reliable because people don’t remember things well after a certain period of time.
So I told his story back to him– not verbatim, but certain phrases were exact– and watched the consternation in his face as I accidentally blew up his (valid! and extensively studied!) lesson about how bad people’s retention is.
“It’s like a song,” I tried to explain to him, and the class. “Or a poem. Every part of the story has a little tag to remember it. I looked at the chalkboard while you were saying this part. My leg itched while you were saying that part. A chair squeaked during the next part. Then I just have to come back and go over all the sensations that I had while you were”
“Sit down,” he said.
I sat.
Turns out I’m Autisms Georg adn should not have been counted
ADHD version: A friend asked, on a field trip, why I knew the scientific name for Caltha palustris, “Well, we did that [one week long] field ID course [three years previously] and we saw it in one of the bogs”.
This, I was informed, is very much not a normal reason to remember the scientific name of a plant for the rest of your life.
It took me five whole years to learn when my partner’s birthday is.
I can remember specific details about games I played over two decades ago that I have not played since.
I once forgot it was my birthday. On my birthday. And when my sister (Who lived several hours away) jumped out of hiding and yelled happy birthday, I looked around to see who she was talking to.
I'll Be Home For Christmas (unless there's a miracle...)
Someone sent me a very kind message that I want to share (while obscuring their identity).
I just wanted to say you're in my thoughts this holiday season. I know how hard the first of any recurring celebrations can be after the loss of a loved one. You don't know me and we'll probably never meet, but I hope you find some comfort in the loving wishes of friends, fans and tumblr passersby. The one human constant is grief and it is love with no vessel to receive it. I hope you have time to mourn, time to love and time to laugh this holiday season and every day going forward.
Umf. This is so thoughtful of you: thanks so very much.
And it's gonna be a challenge.
Today, as of 7:50 AM local time, it will have been exactly seven months since @petermorwood unexpectedly stopped breathing and moved on to Whatever's Next.
Folks who follow me here will have seen that I've been keeping as busy as feasible and/or possible for me, under the circumstances. A certain amount of travel, much of it work-related: some catching up and getting-grounded with friends in the fannish world who knew and liked Peter. And then, as the year progressed, an attempt to get back to something that feels like "normal" work when the long-time mainstay of all the normalcy in my life is suddenly no longer on the scene.
It's been tough.
Now, admittedly, I'm fairly tough too (which after my life so far is, I guess, to be expected). But right now things are turning out to be unexpectedly difficult...
...especially because I'm in Ireland. And Christmas is coming.
(And here you must imagine the transfixed Wile E. Coyote staring down the tunnel at the light of an oncoming train that abruptly turns out to be [ulp!] real.)
If you haven't ever been on this island at this season, the absolutely godawful quality of this situation is difficult to explain or express. In mass media, in public expectation of What You Ought To Be Wanting, and in life just generally... you will rarely have ever seen a place, or a national gestalt or mindspace, in which the expectation that You Ought To Be With Your Loved Ones And Happy At This Festive Season is so fucking inescapable.
...Peter hated it. After his Mum moved on from mortality in the late 2000s, and family Christmases stopped—because she was the glue that had held those together—the incessant Be With Your Loved Ones stuff really started getting under his skin. (As did the inescapability of the underlying religious context, for both of us whose spiritualities are—let's just say—"differently constructed".*) "You know what? Let's get the hell out of Dodge," Himself said to me at the beginning of December one year, "because if we don't, we'll be stuck here, and this is driving me up the wall."
And so we did. We escaped from Ireland on the 22nd of that December and spent the next seven days split between a pair of small hotels in Germany—where there were much-loved business-friends to visit with over the holidays—and where the cultural management of Christmas is way different from the Irish everything-closes-down, no-escape, either-"be with your relatives"-or-"be at home alone with no way to leave." (Because transport in and out of this country becomes astonishingly difficult until two days or so after December 25, and even local transport becomes tough for carless people [which meant us]: no taxis, almost no buses or trains (or none at all). ...Therefore that getaway was emotional balm to the both of us, and afterwards we repeated it when we could afford to.
So. Over the course of the autumn I’ve been gradually starting to try to pull the business of my daily life and (what ought to be) my daily work back into some kind of working order. Not easy, when your best friend and writing partner and husband and confidant and—yeah, let's use the somewhat overused word, soulmate—is suddenly forever absent. After forty years of not being alone, I'm having to learn to do the being-alone thing again: every day, every hour, every minute. And the process has, I guess, been going as well as it could be expected to. No one gets over (or should get over!) forty years of intimate life- and work-partnership in a matter of months. You just kinda slog through day after weary day and take the challenges as they come, hoping you'll grow through them: or at least, grow around them.
But now, yippee, like that train down the tunnel, blaring its horn: here comes Christmas. The first one without him. And I feel kinda idiotic in, earlier this year, not having seen this coming. (sigh) I may have had some kind of idea that by now I'd be able to manage the pain. ...(eyeroll: bwahahahahaNOPE.) :/
This being the case, over recent days I've found myself thinking more and more often that I'd very, very much like to Get The Hell Out Of Dodge, so as to avoid possibly losing what small ground I’ve gained. And it occurred to me over last weekend that there’s still time to make it happen, if (as the song says) "the Fates allow". And if people are inclined to assist, as I'm currently between royalty periods.
My goal is to just get out of the country for that week—a few days before Christmas and a few days after: ideally to take refuge in a city aparthotel somewhere over thataway (waves vaguely at continental Europe), where I can be out of other people's hair, not imposing myself and my pain inescapably on friends at a festive time (but absolutely able to see them: that'd be a high point, if this comes together). This would also mean I'd be able to withdraw to do some work (because book work's very much on my mind right now, as it's been hard to get it done on site), or able to go out for a snack or something, and not just be trapped here in—to get a bit Sherlockian about this—the Empty House. (Which is SO empty now: so dreadfully silent, in this deeply rural place, without even any town or city noises to break the sense of isolation. It's amazing how hugely the nature of a space can change when the other person who lived in it has abruptly stopped doing that. What once felt like a shared refuge can start to feel like a prison.)
Anyway. If I can get the finance end of things to work out, the above-described Escape can happen... assuming that stuff happens quickly enough. (As with passing days, transport and lodging will become more difficult to arrange.)
Therefore, hoping to help this happen, I've rolled the prices in the Ebooks Direct store back to Black Friday/Cyber Monday levels: and there they'll stay until it becomes clear, over the next five days or so, whether this effort can be made to work or not. So expect to see a lot of ads in my timeline until it becomes plain whether this can be made to work. If you feel inclined to add to your TBR pile, please let me point our bundles page at you (or vice versa). There's something like two million words of prose there. Surely that'll get you through until after New Year's. 🙂
Also, for those of you who're already up to your ears in ebooks, but want to be a part of this effort (or who are in the UK, as to my continuing annoyance we can't sell there any more): I'd like to point you at my Ko-Fi, and—if you're inclined to assist—ask you to tag whatever you might like to drop into the pot as “Dodge," or something similar. It'll be very much appreciated, believe me.
And also for those of you who feel inclined: please feel free to reblog this, so that others who might be interested in what's going on can see it.
Thanks, friends. 😊
*For those of you who may not know the story: Peter formally broke off his relationship with organized religion in his early-teen years when the local C-of-I vicar, on a "home visit" to his Mum, attempted to sternly inform him that animals—specifically cats—"had no souls" and therefore would not be admitted to Heaven. Peter (having just rescued a local abandoned kitty) had no time for that idea, and told the vicar so, loudly and angrily... clearly aware of all the possible personal consequences of this position to him at home, and not giving a fuck about them. To the best of my knowledge, he never again set foot inside any religious institution in Northern Ireland except for relatives' weddings and funerals. Yet also: he never willingly missed a Caturday... so now you know a little about why. :)
If you happen to like things I write, well, you may've heard me mention @dduane as one of my biggest inspirations and favorite writers, and she is a wonderful human who does indeed deserve Good Things.
Audio: John Hammond says "Welcome...to Jurassic Park!" The music swells. Right as it's going to start the main theme, the truck carrying the base of the wind turbine blade becomes visible, and the orchestra is replaced by kazoos.
**JUST SCREAMING** @smidnite - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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